LOCKN’ festival set to uplift Charlottesville

Afropunk to mark 12 yrs

NEW YORK, Aug 24, (Agencies): Though the LOCKN’ Festival had been in the works for more than six months, the event taking place about 40 minutes from Charlottesville, Virginia, will now serve as an uplifting moment for the city following its racially charged rally that left one dead and others injured.

Festival co-founder Peter Shapiro said the four-day event, which kicks off Thursday in Arrington, will bring positive vibes “to a place that needs to lift the energy.” The Aug 12 protest by white supremacists in Charlottesville left one counter-protester dead and dozens of others injured.

“I think the energy will be lifted. People want to be lifted right now,” Shapiro said. “They’re going to be open souls and open hearted and ready to be lifted, like a congregation. It’s like a church.”

Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, John Fogerty, the Avett Brothers, Jim James, Gov’t Mule and Margo Price are part of the lineup at the festival, which is in its fifth year. It takes place at Infinity Downs Farms at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“The times lend itself for LOCKN’ to be coming this weekend ... A lot of people are like, ‘Oh man, you’re the next big event in Charlottesville, aren’t you nervous, scared?’ No, this is why we do what we do,” Shapiro said.

Weir, formerly of the Grateful Dead, said “the times really demand that we embrace each other.”

“The feeling I think we will have is that we will regard everyone with equal love, even the people who caused all that trouble. In that particular instance, our regard for them will be tinged with a bit of pity for their unfortunate views and the circumstances that they bring on themselves,” he said.

The festival will be livestreamed on Relix.com and is raising funds to support the organization, Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.

LOCKN’, unlike other festivals with multiple stages, features one rotating stage so that fans can watch all of the performers on the bill. Other set to perform include Brandi Carlile, the Revivalists, JJ Grey & Mofro, the Record Company, Blackberry Smoke and Umprey’s McGee.

Weir

Attention

“I think you going to find that the folks who attend the festival and the folks who play the festival are all of one solid opinion in regard to what happened in Charlottesville,” Weir said. “I would expect there would be some attention given to that issue, but it will probably ... come with the song selection.” Shapiro echoed Weir’s thoughts. “We’re going to show that there’s many more people on the side of positive energy and get things back on the right road, and there’s many more who want to be on that road,” he said. “There are small ways you can ... try to do your own effort to flip the energy. This is our effort.”

Afropunk festival co-founder Matthew Morgan remembers when the musical event carried out as a small gathering on New York’s Lower East Side with 25 people. Now, celebrating its 12th year this weekend in Brooklyn, New York, the festival has also expanded to an international celebration, even traveling to South Africa for the first time in December.

“We’re giving people an opportunity to gather and celebrate being a person-of-color,” Morgan said. “It’s very, very, very important that we connect to our community globally.”

Afropunk returns to Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Park on Saturday and Sunday with performances by Solange, Gary Clark Jr, Raphael Saadiq, Willow Smith, SZA and Anderson.Paak. About 60,000 people are expected to attend.

The festival launched in 2005 and was inspired by the 2003 documentary, “Afro-Punk,” produced by Morgan and directed by festival co-founder James Spooner. The film examined notions that challenged stereotypes about musical artists of color and focused on black performers in the punk rock world.

And this year’s festival continues to challenge those perceptions, Morgan said. “I kind of booked it like a mix tape,” he said. “I want people to be open and free enough to experiment within the space.”

Clark Jr, known for mixing rock, soul, blues and hiphop sounds, has performed at three Afropunk festivals. The Grammy-winning musician said Afropunk “feels right at home.”

“I play at a lot of festivals and Afropunk is one of the few where I play and show up and see folks that look like me, and that feels good,” he said.

The Afropunk festival has been eclectic over the years, featuring performers such as Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Sharon Jones, Lenny Kravitz, D’Angelo, Kelis and Unlocking the Truth. The festival has been held in Atlanta, Paris and London, and will visit Johannesburg in December. Morgan even said he is working to expand to Brazil.

Solange, who experimented with a variety of genres on her 2016 album celebrating black pride, “A Seat at the Table,” will also curate a stage at the festival. Other performers include Kaytranada, Michael Kiwanuka, Soul II Soul, Sampha, Dizzee Rascal, Macy Gray, Thundercat, Nao and King.

Sage Howard, a 23-year-old graduate student from Brooklyn, has attended several Afropunk festivals and looks forward to celebrating a “side of black culture that is deeply rooted in our collective identities.”

Singer and humanitarian Annie Lennox will kick off a week of advocacy in New York to press for foreign aid ahead of a major Sept 23 concert, organizers said Wednesday.

The Global Citizen Festival, which takes places annually in Central Park as world leaders gather across town for the UN General Assembly, this year plans a week of events ahead of the music in hopes of broadening involvement.

The week will open with Global Citizen presenting an award named in honor of late Beatle George Harrison to Lennox, the Eurythmics singer who has long been active in the fight against global poverty as well as HIV/AIDS.

Other events include a 50th anniversary commemoration of Martin Luther King’s “Beyond Vietnam” talk, among the slain civil rights icon’s more controversial speeches, in which he condemned the US war effort in Southeast Asia and urged a focus on fighting poverty.

The September 17 event will take place in the same Riverside Church in Upper Manhattan where King spoke and include civil rights activist and minister Al Sharpton as well as actor Forest Whitaker.